What this competition is
Cote d’Ivoire recruits new primary and preschool teachers through a competitive written exam for entry into the CAFOP network (Centres d’Animation et de Formation Pedagogique), the country’s teacher-training colleges, not through a CV review or an interview alone. The exam is the concours direct regionalise d’entree dans les CAFOP, commonly called CAFOP-IA, opened each year by the Ministere de l’Education Nationale et de l’Alphabetisation (MENA) through its Direction des Examens et Concours (DECO). Candidates admitted after the written and psychotechnical stages spend time training at a CAFOP before taking up a teaching post. Since an interministerial order of 4 October 2022, acting on a recommendation of the Etats Generaux de l’Education Nationale et de l’Alphabetisation (EGENA), the competition has been regionalised: candidates register with the regional education department (DRENA) covering the district they want to teach in and compete for that district’s own quota of seats, rather than one undivided national ranking. That regional registration is a design choice about where a seat is won, not a sign of the fragmented, separately-scheduled-campaign shape that disqualifies some of this competition’s regional neighbours: the written exam itself is held on one date, nationwide, under one ministry, with one combined national candidate count and one combined national post count reported every year by the Ivorian press.
How the competition actually runs
The written stage, the first round, tests French, Mathematics and General Knowledge (culture generale), sat on the same day at exam centres spread across the country’s 14 districts. For the 2025 session, 132 centres hosted the written exam on 15 March 2025; for 2026, that grew to 154 centres, with the exams opened at the College Moderne de Cocody in Abidjan on 11 April 2026. Candidates declared admissible from the written stage then sit a second round: a psychotechnical aptitude test, which press coverage of the 2025 session describes as centralised at the regional education department covering Abidjan rather than held in every district. Registration itself runs through DECO’s national candidate platform, ePedago, with the paper dossier filed at the DRENA for the district chosen at registration.
Who is eligible
Candidates must hold Ivorian nationality, attested with an original Certificat de Nationalite Ivoirienne, and must be aged at least 18 and at most 36 at 31 December of the session’s year, per the conditions published for the 2026 session. The diploma requirement is fixed by DECO’s own opening decision each session rather than being constant: coverage of different sessions names the entry diploma as the BEPC (the lower-secondary diploma) for some sessions and the Baccalaureat for others, so the exact requirement for any given year needs to be read off that year’s own decision rather than assumed from a prior year’s. The paper dossier itself carries document requirements with their own validity windows: a judicial record extract issued less than six months before filing, a birth certificate extract issued less than one year before filing, and a medical fitness certificate issued by the DMOSS (Direction de la Medecine d’Ouvrage Scolaire et Sanitaire) following a medical visit. Candidates admitted to a CAFOP must also sign an engagement form committing them, once appointed, to serve at least ten years in the region they registered for before requesting a transfer elsewhere.
Scale
Ivorian press coverage of this competition gives a consistent, multi-year scale. Koaci reported 61,862 candidates for 6,000 posts when the 2024 session was launched at Odienne on 25 March 2024; 62,955 candidates (34,897 women, 28,058 men) for 6,000 posts at the 2025 session’s written exam, launched in Daloa on 15 March 2025, a figure APA News (Agence de Presse Africaine) independently confirmed in its own coverage of the same session; and 67,803 candidates (38,007 women, 29,796 men), a record at the time, for 7,000 posts when the 2026 session’s written exam opened in Abidjan on 11 April 2026. That is roughly 10 candidates for every post on offer in the most recent session, a ratio that has stayed broadly similar across the three sourced years even as both the candidate pool and the post count grew.
What this page does not yet cover
This page covers the regionalised concours’s three most recently sourced sessions, 2024 through 2026; a sourced national candidate total for the competition’s pre-regionalisation years, before the October 2022 interministerial order, was not found in the research behind this page and is not assumed here. The precise national-to-regional vacancy breakdown by district, the exact weighting between the written and psychotechnical stages, and the full text of any given session’s own diploma-eligibility decision were not found in sourced form either and are left to DECO’s own official decision for that session. Cote d’Ivoire’s other major written-competitive entry routes, the general concours administratifs de la fonction publique (423 separately opened recruitment and promotion competitions for the 2026 cycle alone, spanning many grades and ministries) and the six separately opened concours d’entree a l’Ecole Nationale d’Administration for the 2027 intake (three direct and three professional, across three training cycles, recruiting roughly 600 people combined), were researched for this page but are not covered by it: both are genuine written exams, but both are split into many separately opened, separately scheduled competitions rather than this page’s single coordinated session, the same fragmented shape that kept Cameroon’s ENAM and ENS/ENSET concours off this site. Either could still earn its own page if a future pass finds a single nameable competition within them with its own sourced, undivided scale.